You know, I should be careful about what I wish for.  Yesterday was such a hum drum day that I fussed that I had nothing to write about.  Well, apparently the universe was listening!  I should have known, of course.  A full moon, a change in the weather coming, three weeks before Christmas break ( I hate calling it winter break – sorry) and the fact that my choir kids were literally climbing the walls by 7:45 this morning.  I’m not helping things much when I insist on working on our holiday sing-a-long at this time as well.

But the best was yet to come around 2:00 this afternoon.  Twenty three wonderful 6 year olds came bouncing into my room.  Well, they came in pretty quietly actually, but as soon as they saw we were going to sing holiday songs, then they began bouncing.  So imagine the excitement that ensued as individual kids began asking to go to the restroom and telling me when their birthdays were in December and I’m relocating children who are having trouble controlling their bodies and then the phone rings.   Somewhere around “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”, I talked to the school secretary who told me that one of the kids needed to come to the office.  I hung up, only to find out that she had called the wrong class.  Kids are still coming up to talk to me about how they know this song and and can they please go to the bathroom, as I call the computer teacher, apologize for interrupting and ask him to send the child to the office.  As I’m talking to him,  another child comes up to me in tears and says something, but she’s not bleeding, so I ask her to hang on while I finish the call.  Then I ask her what’s wrong and she says, in a total panic “I swallowed a marble!!”

So, the mom in me kicks in.  She’s crying, she’s talking, she’s breathing, so she’s not choking.  This is good.  But a marble?  Where did she get a marble and why was it in her mouth? So I send her off to the nurse with another 6 year old, while I get on the phone again, trying to keep the music going so that the kids don’t go crazy as I tell the nurse that I’m sending a kid to her who apparently swallowed a marble.  Well, turns out it wasn’t a marble, but if I got the message right, it was a chip for playing bingo, and while it apparently caught for a second on the way down, she did manage to swallow it.  After a call to the doctor and her mom, the nurse sent her back to my room.

The child was sighing a huge sigh of relief because she was imagining having surgery to get the “marble” out of her stomach, but apparently the nurse informed her that it would eventually just “come out”.  (Her words, not mine and she motioned to her backside).   Five minutes after returning to class, she asks to use the restroom.  I don’t have the heart or the energy to explain to her that that might be a LITTLE too quick for the offending item to find it’s way through her digestive system, so I let her go.  As soon as she leaves, the topic of conversation among the six year olds now is how she’s going to poop this item out.  We talk so that they don’t say something in front of her and embarrass her when she comes back, which was apparently not needed because she had no problem sharing that she had NOT pooped it out and now she has become some kind of hero to her classmates.

One more phone call from the office to get yet another child from my room, and I gratefully sent them back with their teacher.  Thinking that I was now going to finish my day with 9-10 year olds for the rest of the afternoon, we began to work on our Heritage Schools songs.  As we began “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad”, the animation showed a young boy using a mallet to hit spikes into the railroad ties.  During a quiet section of the music, a voice behind me says “that’s child labor!”.  As I walked to my desk to write that down, laughing out loud, I thought of something a friend said to me today about writing.  She said to pray about it and He will tell me what to write.  It’s nice to know that God has a sense of humor.